LITMIR.BIZ

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spent that Friday night in April on my couch, stewing over the gag order on my article and flicking from account to account. Suddenly I came across a video of a French jihadist who looked to be about thirty-five. The video showed him taking inventory of the items inside his SUV. It was like a bad parody of the farcical news show Les Guignols de l’info. I smiled wryly at the deplorable images. I wasn’t proud of myself, but I couldn’t help watching; it was absurd. The man in the video wore military fatigues and called himself Abu Bilel. He claimed to be in Syria. The scene around him, a true no-man’s-land, didn’t contradict him. He proudly brandished his CB radio, which looked like it came straight out of the 1970s. He used it to communicate with other militants when he couldn’t reach them through telephone networks. In reality, it crackled more than it communicated. In the back of his car, his bulletproof vest sat beside one of his machine guns, an Uzi—a historic gun originally manufactured for the Israeli military. He presented a series of weapons, including “an M16 stolen from a marine in Iraq”—I burst out laughing. The factoid, I would later learn, was entirely plausible. I would also discover that Abu Bilel was not as stupid as he seemed. In fact, he had spent the past fifteen years waging jihad all over the world. But for the moment I knew nothing of the bellicose man on my screen proudly unveiling the contents of his glove box—a thick stack of Syrian pounds, candy, a knife. He removed his reflective Ray-Bans, revealing darkly lined black eyes.

      I knew that Afghani soldiers used eyeliner to keep their eyes from tearing up when exposed to smoke. Still, seeing a terrorist with eyes made up like my own was surprising, to say the least. Abu Bilel spoke perfect French, with what sounded to me like a very slight Algerian accent. He smiled broadly in an expression of self-satisfaction as he beckoned viewers and called for hijrah.*

      I shared his video. I usually kept a low profile on my account, but I occasionally imitated my digital peers in order to carve a place for myself in their world. I didn’t preach or encourage the cause. I simply posted links to articles relating strikes by Bashar al-Assad’s army or videos like this one. My profile picture was a cartoon image of Princess Jasmine from the Disney movie Aladdin. For my cover photo, I uploaded a popular slogan I’d seen online: “We’ll do to you as you do unto us.” I tended to change my profile location depending on whatever story I was presently researching. Now I claimed to be in Toulouse, a city in southwestern France. Over the past five years, many stories had led me there, notably, the shooting carried out by Mohammed Merah in 2012. The housing project where he’d lived in the northeastern outskirts of Toulouse was an endless mine of information. It was also an important hub for the traffic of hashish.

      I was actually in Paris, casting around for a fresh angle on the departures to Syria. Many of these tragic cases resembled one another, and I suspected that readers were saturated with information. In addition, the nightmarish situation in Syria made it difficult to analyze. Each week, I worked with editors, trying to find new angles. Each week, we arrived at the same conclusion: would-be jihadists came from all sorts of social backgrounds and religions; they turned to radical Islam after a single failure or a lifetime of not fitting in; then they left for Syria to join one of the many Islamist gangs that have been proliferating there. Yes, but despite the similarities, after having spent so much time working on these issues, I had grown attached to individual families. I cared about their children and their stories, even if I wasn’t likely to meet them. And I had actually met some “teens” drawn to jihadism while I was working on stories. Today, when I see them again, they tell me they want to go there. There? “What’s there for you?” I ask them, exasperated, “Except death and the opportunity to become cannon fodder?” The response is almost always the same: “You don’t understand, Anna. You’re thinking with your head, not with your heart.” I exhaust myself coming up with dubious comparisons to historic events. Germany, a country rich in culture, fell into Hitler’s hands during the last century. Or the black-and-white view of the world according to communism. Or the generation of 1970s intellectuals who extolled the virtues of Maoist thought, insisting that truth resided in the Little Red Book. But my cyber interlocutors poke fun at my historical references, pointing out that red and green are very different colors. However, I’m not talking about the Koran, which has nothing to do with fanatic ideology.

      In 2014, journalism was no longer a respected profession. And when one worked on “societal” issues, it was out of passion. If only I could write about this topic in a new way, one that avoided treating individuals as part of a succession of similar cases. I wanted to investigate the roots of “digital jihadism” and get to the bottom of an evil phenomenon affecting more and more families—of all religious backgrounds. To dissect how kids here fell into the trap of propaganda, and to grasp the paradox of soldiers there who spent their days torturing, stealing, raping, killing, and being killed, and their nights staring into their computers and bragging about their “exploits” with the maturity of video-game-obsessed preteens.

      Deep in reflection, I was feeling discouraged but unwilling to give up, when my computer alerted me to three messages sent to “Mélodie’s” private inbox from . . . Abu Bilel. It was surreal. There I was, at ten o’clock on a Friday night in spring, sitting on my sofa in my one-bedroom Parisian apartment, wondering how to continue my investigation on European teenagers tempted by Islamic extremism, when a French terrorist based in Syria all of a sudden started writing me. I was speechless. At that moment, the only thing of which I was certain was that I hadn’t imagined starting my weekend like this.

       The same night

      “Salaam alaikum, sister. I see you watched my video. It’s gone viral—crazy! Are you Muslim?”

      “What do you think about mujahideen?”

      “Last question: are you thinking about coming to Syria?”

      He certainly got straight to the point! I didn’t know what to do. I instantly understood that speaking with this jihadist offered a unique opportunity that might lead to a mine of information, and I was eager to respond. When you present yourself as a journalist, it’s difficult to get people to speak sincerely. In this case, my interlocutor didn’t know who I was. Using this account to request information for an article didn’t bother me. However, the idea of starting a conversation with a person who didn’t know who I was introduced an ethical problem. I took five minutes to think. Long enough to consider his code of ethics . . . and then I replied:

      “Walaikum salaam. I didn’t think a jihadist would talk to me. Don’t you have better things to do? LOL. I’m not prejudiced against fighters. Anyway, it depends on the person.”

      I also told him I’d converted to Islam, but didn’t offer any details. I deliberately included spelling mistakes, and I tried to use teen vocabulary—LOL, LMAO, ROFL,^* and other acronyms they pepper into their correspondence. I waited for his reply, a knot in my stomach. I wasn’t afraid; I just couldn’t believe this was happening. It seemed too big to be true. I’d interviewed mujahideen before, but never anyone over twenty years old, and never anyone who expressed anything outside of the official propaganda. While I waited, I surfed the Web, scanning other pages. Barely three minutes had passed when my computer alerted me to a new message.

      “Of course I have a lot of things to do! But here it’s eleven o’clock at night and the fighters are finished for the day. Do you have any questions about the video you shared? I can tell you about everything going on in Syria—the only real truth: Allah’s truth. We should talk over Skype. I’ll give you my username.”

      Bilel was direct . . . and authoritative. Skype was out of the question! I ignored his proposal and suggested we talk another time. Mélodie wasn’t available now. Abu Bilel understood; he didn’t want to bother her. He’d make himself available for her tomorrow whenever she wanted.

      “Tomorrow?” I asked, surprised. “Are you sure you’ll have Internet access?”

      “Of course. I’ll be here. I promise.” Then, a minute later:

      “You converted, so . . . you

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